Manual of Painting and Calligraphy

A Novel

José Saramago

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780547640242
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Littérature portugaise

A disgruntled portrait artist in 1970s Portugal turn to writing in the Nobel Prize-winning author's debut novel, now available in English translation. Manual of Painting and Calligraphy was José Saramago's first novel. Written eight years before the critically acclaimed Baltasar and Blimunda, it is a story of self-discovery set in Portugal during the last years of Antonio Salazar's dictatorship. It tells the story of a struggling artist who is commissioned to paint a portrait of an influential industrialist. Disheartened by his squandered talent, the artist soon undergoes a creative and political awakening when he discovers the possibilities of writing. The brilliant juxtaposition of a passionate love story and the crisis of a nation foreshadows the themes of Saramago's major works.

On revient de loin. La formation bourgeoise, l’orgueil intellectuel.

La nécessité de se réviser à tout moment.

Les liens qui subsistent.

La sentimentalité.

L’empoisonnement de la culture orientée.

—PAUL VAILLANT-COUTURIER

I SHALL GO ON painting the second picture but I know it will never be finished. I have tried without success and there is no clearer proof of my failure and frustration than this sheet of paper on which I am starting to write. Sooner or later I shall move from the first picture to the second and then turn to my writing, or I shall skip the intermediate stage or stop in the middle of a word to apply another brushstroke to the portrait commissioned by S. or to that other portrait alongside it which S. will never see. When that day comes I shall know no more than I know today (namely, that both pictures are worthless). But I shall be able to decide whether I was right to allow myself to be tempted by a form of expression which is not mine, although this same temptation may mean in the end that the form of expression I have been using as carefully as if I were following the fixed rules of some manual was not mine either. For the moment I prefer not to think about what I shall do if this writing comes to nothing; if, from now on, my white canvases and blank sheets of paper become a world orbiting thousands of light-years away where I shall not be able to leave the slightest trace. If, in a word, it was dishonest to pick up a brush or pen or if, once more in a word (the first time I did not succeed), I must deny myself the right to communicate or express myself, because I shall have tried and failed and there will be no further opportunities.

My clients appreciate me as a painter. No one else. The critics used to say (during the brief period many years ago when they still discussed my work) that I am at least fifty years behind the times, which, strictly speaking, means that I am in that larval state between conception and birth: a fragile and precarious human hypothesis, a bitter and ironic interrogation as to what awaits me. “Unborn.” I have sometimes paused to reflect on this situation, which, transitory for most people, has become definitive in my case, and to my surprise I find it painful yet stimulating and agreeable, the blade of a knife one handles cautiously while the thrill of this challenge makes us press the living flesh of our fingers against the certainty of that cutting edge. This is what I vaguely feel (without either blade or living flesh) when I start on a new picture. The smooth white canvas waiting to be prepared, a birth certificate to be filled in, where I (the clerk of a civil register without archives) believe I can write in new dates and different relationships which might spare me once and for all, or at least for an hour, this incongruity of not being born. I wet my brush and bring it close to the canvas, torn between the reassuring rules learned from the manual and my hesitation as to what I shall choose in order to be. Then, certainly confused, firmly trapped in the condition of being who I am (not being) for so many years, I apply the first brushstroke, and at that very moment I am incriminated in my own eyes. As in that celebrated drawing by Brueghel (Pieter), there appears behind me a profile carved out with a cutting tool, and I can hear a voice telling me once more that I am not yet born. Thinking it over carefully, I am honest enough to dispense with the opinions of critics, experts and connoisseurs. As I meticulously transpose the proportions of the model onto the canvas, I can hear an inner voice insisting that painting bears no relationship whatsoever to what I am doing. As I change my brush and take two steps backward in order to focus more clearly and work out the distinctive features of this face I am about “to portray,” I reply inwardly, “I know,” and carry on reconstituting an indispensable blue, some landscape or other, white strokes to provide the light I shall never be able to capture. None of this gives me any satisfaction, because I am merely observing the rules, protected by the indifference which critics have used like a cordon sanitaire to isolate me; protected, too, by the oblivion into which I have gradually fallen, and because I know that this picture will never be exhibited in any gallery. It will pass directly from the easel into the hands of the buyer, for this is how I do business, by playing safe and demanding payment in cash. There is no lack of work. I paint the portraits of people who have enough self-esteem to commission them and hang them in the foyer, office, lounge or boardroom. I can guarantee durability; I do not guarantee art, nor do they ask for it even if I were able to oblige. A flattering resemblance is as much as they expect. And since we are in agreement here, no one is disappointed. But what I am doing cannot be called painting.

Yet, prepared as I am to confess to these deficiencies, I have always known that no portrait is ever faithful. I would go further: I have always thought myself capable (a secondary symptom of schizophrenia) of painting a true portrait but always forced myself to remain silent (or assumed that I was forcing myself to remain silent, thus deluding myself and becoming an accomplice) before the defenseless model who patiently sat there, feeling nervous or pretending to be relaxed, certain only of the money he would pay me but foolishly intimidated by the invisible forces which slowly swirled between the surface of the canvas and my eyes. I alone knew that the picture was already finished before the first sitting and that my task would be to conceal what could not be shown. As for the eyes, they were blind. The painter and his model always look terrified and ridiculous when confronted with a white canvas, the one because he is frightened of being incriminated, the other because he knows himself incapable of making any accusation, or, worse still, tells himself—with the presumption of the castrated demiurge who boasts of his virility—that he will refrain from doing so only out of indifference or compassion for the model.

There are moments when I manage to persuade myself that I am the only portrait painter left and that once I am gone no one will waste any more time on tiresome sittings or trying in vain to achieve some resemblance when photography, which has now become an art form by means of filters and emulsions, seems to be much more successful at penetrating the surface and revealing the first inner layer of a human being. It amuses me to think that I am pursuing an extinct art, thanks to which, because of my fallibility, people believe they can capture a somewhat pleasing image of themselves, organized in terms of certainty, of an eternity which does not only begin when the portrait is finished but was there before, forever, like something that has always existed simply because it exists now, an eternity counted back to zero. In fact, if the client were able or willing to analyze the viscous and amorphous density of his emotions and then find ordinary words to clarify his thoughts and actions, we would know that for the sitter it is as if that portrait of him had always existed, another him, truer than his former self because the latter is no longer visible, whereas the portrait is. This explains why clients are often anxious to resemble the portrait, if it has captured them at a moment when they like and accept themselves. The painter exists to capture that fleeting glance, the sitter lives for that moment which will be the one and only pillar of support for the two branches of an eternity which is forever passing and which human folly (Erasmus) sometimes believes it can mark with the tiniest of knots, an outgrowth capable of scratching this gigantic finger with which time obliterates all traces. I repeat that the best portraits give the impression of always having existed, even though my common sense may tell me, as it is telling me even now, that The Man with Gray Eyes (Titian) is inseparable from that Titian who painted the portrait at a given moment in his own lifetime. For if there is something which participates in eternity at this moment, it is the picture rather than the painter.

Unfortunately for the painter, or, to put it more precisely, all the worse for the painter who is trying to paint a portrait only to discover that everything is wrong, the lines are awkward, the colors wild, and the blotches on the canvas capture a likeness which may satisfy the sitter but certainly not the painter. I believe this happens in the majority of cases, but because the resemblance is flattering and justifies the fee, the client carries home that presumably ideal image of himself and the painter sighs with relief, freed from the mocking specter which has been haunting him night and day. When the finished portrait remains there, waiting to be collected, it is as if it were revolving on its vertical axis and turning accusing eyes on the painter: one might almost call it an apparition, had it not already been described as a specter. On the whole, any painter who really knows his craft recognizes that he is moving in the wrong direction right from the initial sketch. But given the difficulty of explaining his mistake to the sitter, and because most clients are pleased with what they see from the outset, afraid that another angle or perspective might show them in a less favorable light, or, on the contrary, turn them inside out, like the finger of a glove (the thing they fear most of all), the painting of the portrait goes on, increasingly superfluous. As I said earlier (in different words), it is as if the painter and his model were both intent on destroying the portrait. They have put their boots on back to front, and the path they have covered, which appears to go forward because of the footprints left on the ground, in this case the canvas, is in fact a hasty retreat after a defeat sought and accepted by the two warring factions. When death removes the painter and his model from this world, and the flames, by some happy coincidence, reduce the portrait to ashes, they will erase some of the deception and make room for some new adventure or dance, some new pas de deux which others will inevitably recommence.

On starting to paint the portrait of S., I also realized that my method of division (a picture, according to my academic approach, is also an arithmetical operation of division, the fourth and most acrobatic of operations) was wrong. I knew it even before drawing a line on the canvas. Yet I made no attempt to correct anything or start again. I accepted that the toes of the boots should be pointing north while I was allowing myself to be dragged south toward a treacherous sea where ships are lost, to an encounter with the Flying Dutchman. But I soon realized that the sitter on this occasion would not be deceived or would only be prepared to be deceived the moment I showed any awareness of being at his disposal and therefore allowed myself to be humiliated. A portrait that should embody a certain circumstantial solemnity, of the kind that expects no more from one’s eyes than a fleeting glance and then blindness, came to be marked (is being marked even now) by an ironic crease which was not my doing, which may not even exist on S.’s face, yet deforms the canvas, as if someone were twisting it simultaneously in opposite directions, just as irregular or faulty mirrors distort images. When I look at the picture on my own, I can see myself as a child at a window in one of the many houses where I lived, and I can see those elliptical bubbles in the glass panes of poor quality found in such houses, or that impression like an adolescent nipple sometimes formed in glass, and that distorted world outside which was all askew whenever I looked away from the windowpane in either direction. The portrait on the canvas stretched over the frame ripples before my eyes, undulates and escapes, and it is I who am forced to admit defeat and avert my gaze and not the painting, which opens up once understood.

I do not tell myself that the work is not ruined, as I have done on other occasions in order to go on painting, anesthetized and remote. The portrait is as far from being completed as I would wish or as close to being finished as I had hoped. A couple of brushstrokes would finish it, two thousand would not give me sufficient time. Until yesterday, I still believed I could complete the second portrait in time, I felt confident I could finish both pictures on the same day. S. would collect the first portrait and leave the second one with me, proof of a victory I alone would relish, but that would be my revenge against the irony of that distorted image S. would hang on his wall. But today, precisely because I am sitting in front of this paper, I know that my labors have only just begun. I have two portraits on two different easels, each in its own room, the first portrait there for all to see, the second locked up in the secrecy of my abortive attempt, and these sheets of paper represent a further attempt I shall make empty-handed, without the assistance of paints and brushes, simply with this calligraphy, this black thread that coils and uncoils, comes to a halt with periods and commas, draws breath within tiny white spaces and then advances sinuously as if crossing the labyrinth of Crete or the intestines of S. (How odd: this comparison surfaced quite unexpectedly and without any provocation. While the first is no more than a commonplace image from classical mythology, the second is so unusual that it gives me some hope. Frankly, it would be meaningless if I were to say that I am trying to probe the spirit, soul, heart and mind of S.; the intestines form another kind of secret.) And as I said at the outset, I shall go from room to room, from easel to easel, only to return to this little table, to this lamp, to this calligraphy, to this thread which is constantly breaking and has to be tied beneath my pen yet is my only hope of salvation and knowledge.

What is the word “salvation” doing here? Nothing could be more rhetorical under the circumstances, and I loathe rhetoric, although it is my profession, for every portrait is rhetorical. Here is one of the meanings of “rhetoric”: “Everything we use in discourse to impress others and win over our audience.” Knowledge is preferable, because to desire and strive for it always commands respect, although everyone knows how easy it is to slip from sincerity into the most awful pedantry. All too often knowledge entrenches itself within the most solid bastions of ignorance and contempt. It is just a matter of using the word unwittingly or without paying too much attention, so that the simple combination of its sounds will occupy the place or space (inside the air pocket where the word lodges and mingles) of what should be, if truly understood and practiced, a work to the exclusion of everything else. Have I now made myself understood? Have I myself understood? Cognition is the act of knowing: this is the simplest definition, with which I must be satisfied, for it is essential that I should be able to simplify everything in order to proceed. It was never exactly a question of knowing in the portraits I have painted. Enough has already been said about the counterfeit money in my change and I have nothing more to add. But if on this occasion I was unable to simply mess up the canvas in accordance with the desires and money of the sitter, if for the first time I secretly began to paint a second portrait of the same sitter, and if, also for the first time, I am repeating, attempting, drawing a portrait in words which definitely eluded me through the medium of painting, this can be attributed to knowledge. When I applied the first stroke to the canvas, I should have put my brush down, and, with all the apologies of which I am capable in order to disguise the extravagance of my gesture, I should have accompanied S. to the door and calmly watched him go down the stairs, or taken a deep breath in order to recover my composure with the unexpected relief of someone who has just had a narrow escape. Then there would have been no second portrait, I should not have bought these sheets of paper or be struggling with words more awkward than brushes, more similar in color than these paints which refuse to dry in there. I would not be this triple man who for the third time is going to try to say what he has unsuccessfully tried to say twice before.

That is how it turned out. The first picture was a complete failure and I could not give up. If S. eluded me, or I failed to capture him and he realized it, then the only solution would be a second portrait painted in his absence. I tried this. The sitter became the first portrait and the invisible one I was pursuing. I could never be satisfied with a mere likeness, nor even with the psychological probing within the grasp of any apprentice, based on precepts as banal as those which give form to the most naturalistic and superficial of portraits. The moment S. entered my studio I realized I had to know everything if I wanted to dissect that self-assurance, that impassiveness, that smug expression of being handsome and healthy, that insolence cultivated day by day so that it might strike where it hurt most. I demanded a higher fee than usual and he agreed, paying me a deposit there and then. But I should have put my brush aside at the very first sitting, when I found myself humiliated without quite knowing why, without so much as a word having been spoken. One glance was enough and I found myself asking, “Who is this man?” This is precisely the question no painter should ask himself, yet there I was doing just that. As risky as asking a psychoanalyst to take his interest in a patient just a little bit further, which could lead him to the edge of the precipice and his inevitable downfall. Every painting should be executed on this side of the precipice, and in my opinion the same is true of psychoanalysis. And it was precisely in order to keep myself on this side that I began the second portrait. This double game was my salvation, I had a trump card which allowed me to hover over the abyss while to all intents and purposes appearing to founder, suffering the humiliation of someone who has tried and failed in his own eyes as well as in the eyes of others. But the game became complicated and now I am a painter who has erred twice, who persists in error because he cannot escape and turns to writing without knowing its secrets. However inappropriate or apt the comparison, I am about to try to decipher an enigma with a code unknown to me.

This very day I decided to attempt a definitive portrait of S. in words. I do not believe that at any time during the last two months (it was exactly two months yesterday that I began the first portrait) the idea would have occurred to me. Yet, strange to relate, it came naturally, without taking me by surprise, without my questioning it in the name of my literary ineptitude, and the first action it provoked was the purchase of this paper, as naturally as if I were buying tubes of paint or a set of new brushes. I was out for the rest of the day (having made no appointments for any sittings). I drove out of the city with a ream of paper on the seat beside me, as if parading my latest conquest, the kind of conquest for which the seat of a car is as good as a couch. I dined alone. And when I returned home I made straight for the studio, uncovered the portrait, applied several brushstrokes at random, and once more covered the canvas. Then I went into the spare room where I keep my suitcases and old paintings; I added the same brushstrokes to the second portrait with the automatic concentration of someone performing his thousandth exorcism and then seated myself here in this tiny room of mine, part library, part refuge, where women have never felt at their ease.

What do I want? First, not to be defeated. Then, if possible, to succeed. And no matter where these two portraits lead me, to succeed will be to discover the truth about S. without arousing his suspicion, since his presence and images bear witness to my proven inability to give satisfaction while satisfying myself. I cannot say what steps I shall take, what kind of truth I am pursuing. All I can say is that I have found it intolerable not to know. I am almost fifty and have reached the age when wrinkles no longer accentuate one’s features but give expression to the next phase, that of encroaching old age, and suddenly, I repeat, I have found it intolerable to lose, not to know, to go on making gestures in the dark, to be a robot which dreams night after night of escaping from the punched tape of its program, from the tapeworm existence between the circuits and transistors. Were you to ask me whether I would take the same decision even if S. were not to appear, I would be at a loss for an answer. I think I would but cannot swear to it. Meanwhile, now that I have started to write, I feel as if I had never done anything else and that I was actually born to write.

I observe myself writing as I have never observed myself painting, and discover what is fascinating about this craft. There always comes a moment in painting when the picture cannot take another brushstroke (bad or good, it can only make the picture worse), while these lines can go on forever, aligning the numbers of a sum that will never be achieved but whose alignment is already something perfect, a definitive achievement because known. I find the idea of infinite prolongation particularly fascinating. I shall be able to go on writing for the rest of my life, whereas pictures are locked into themselves and repel. Tyrannical and aloof, they are trapped inside their own skin.

I ASK MYSELF why I wrote that S. is handsome. Neither of the two portraits shows him to be so, and the first one should try to present him in a favorable light, or at least give a real likeness with all the flattering ingredients of a portrait that will be well rewarded. To be frank, S. is not handsome. But he has that self-assurance I have always envied, a face with regular features in the right proportions which confers that solid look which men who are physically as weak as I am cannot help but envy. He moves at his ease, sits in a chair without so much as looking at it and is comfortably seated at once, without any need for further adjustments which betray embarrassment and timidity. One might think he had been born with all his battles won or that he has others to do his fighting for him, invisible warriors who quietly perish without fanfare or speech, preparing the way as if they were simply the bristles of a broom. I do not believe S. is a millionaire by current standards, but he is not short of money. This is something one can tell just from the way in which he lights a cigarette or looks around him. The rich man never sees or notices, he simply looks and lights a cigarette with the air of someone expecting it to arrive already lit. The rich man lights the offended cigarette, that is to say, the rich man is offended as he lights the cigarette because there is no one there to do it for him. I am sure S. would have found it perfectly natural if I had rushed forward or showed signs of doing so. But I do not smoke and I have always kept a sharp eye for a chance to deflate and subvert this affected gesture—from the moment a flame is released from a lighter and then extinguished, the opening and closing of a circular movement, according to circumstances, can be a sign of adulation, of subservience, of complicity, a subtle or crude invitation to go to bed. S. would have liked me to acknowledge the wealth and power I perceive there. Artists, however, traditionally enjoy some privileges which, even when they do not exploit them, or only exploit them as a last resort, maintain a romantic aura of irreverence, which confirms the client in his (provisional) state of subordination and in his individual superiority. In this somewhat farcical relationship, the artist and the client each plays his respective role. Deep down, S. would have despised me if I had attempted to light his cigarette, but worse still, he would have achieved what he wanted had I done so. There were no surprises on either side and everything passed off as expected.

S. is of medium height, robust, in good physical shape (as far as I can tell) for a man who appears to be in his forties. He has enough gray hairs at the temples to add a touch of distinction, and he would be the perfect model for advertising luxury products associated with country life, such as br...